I’ve found a text I remember reading a couple of years ago, from an essay by Maurice Blanchot called Two Versions of the Imaginary. Let me try to summarize what I find interesting about it, and bring it towards these ideas of crossing out and leaving gaps, which we’ve been discussing for the Silence talk.

Blanchot homes in on the cadaver as a unique instance of signification. He says “someone who has just died is first of all very close to the condition of a thing – a familiar thing that we handle and approach”, but shortly after death a moment comes when the cadaver’s relations with the world cease, as “our care and the prerogative of our former passions, no longer able to know their object, fall back on us”. The cadaver cannot be known, and yet he still appears within the world, and I think what Blanchot means is that the cadaver becomes a signified thing with no signifier. Or rather, it becomes its own signifier – a thing that is its own image – “the equal, equal to an absolute, overwhelming and marvelous degree”.

Last week Alex wrote: “like the openness of the wardrobe door, its state of gaping unshutness, crossing out is the absence that alludes to presence”. Can we tentatively say Alex’s open wardrobe door is Blanchot’s cadaver, whose presence before us, he says, “is the presence of the unknown”?

And there’s her box of split dead figs in Venice, which are maybe too gory to occupy the careful space of the new cadaver whose name has only just departed, but which in another way occupy this in-between space of the unknown. The relationship these things have isn’t clear to me yet, but I think it’s there.

She wrote: “the violence of the split fallen figs shocked everyone on the bridge, you could see their horrified, curious faces coming over the bridge, trying to decipher what death was there, carrion on the footpath – not wanting to look, but looking. Because of the violence of the scene though, it wasn’t even a relief to know that they were only dead figs”.

I am glad to have read this paragraph. It cleanly makes sense of the feeling of the figure and ground I often have in mind and which is present in a lot of my work, and happily shakes out the questionable phrase “art is anything with a frame around it”, which I’ve used and heard people using to explain the differentiation with which art asserts itself from the stuff around it.

But what interests me specifically about his analogy is the resonance of the used utensil in the things I make, and that are beginning to appear in my writing. And I think it’s in the structure of my writing. Lately I am wanting to approach a thing and back down, and try again from another point, approach, and turn around, and never quite reach the thing. It’s the practice of quietening things and words to the point that they almost cease to refer altogether – which is something I’ve worked in for a long time, but I think more recently I’m making it happen on the level of discourse rather than inside the words themselves.

[…] I think there’s a common concern running through these two strands of my work, which up to now I’ve seen as quite separate things. I don’t know yet what it is that they share. It has something to do with the quietening of their affective force, an interest in the way things can be framed, the relationship between the presence of something and one’s access to that presence. I think it continues to relate back to the old questions I’ve always had about what makes something art, and the “art is something that has a frame around it” thing. […]

[…] In this case the dome had the function of naming: of gathering everything under its umbrella into a noun. It didn’t directly touch the language that it contained, but exerted pressure on the way it was perceived. All the unnoticed variants were exerting pressure on the inside of the dome but it wasn’t sufficient to rupture its skin without extra-linguistic forces (namely Emperor Charlemagne who liked clarity of diction). The skin disintegrated once it had been breeched, and language flowed through in both directions: varieties that had been called Latin no longer aspired towards it, and varieties previously excluded from the Latin dome would presumably have crept towards the newly liberated vernaculars and found some integration. The point is that everything was on the edge. Every speaker considered themselves to be speaking Latin and approximately was, and then every single speaker realized Latin was somewhere else, and what they were speaking must approximate something else. Better! It didn’t approximate anything – it wasn’t nearly like anything – there was nothing left for it to be nearly like. Overnight every peculiarity of speech became legitimized. Each variety became itself (…Blanchot, Two Versions of the Imaginary). […]